Valeria Belletti,
Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s.
(Ed. and annotated by Cari Beauchamp.)
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0 520 24780 9
231pp
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

Once again Cari Beauchamp has produced a fascinating glimpse into the history of women’s early involvement in US cinema. While her earlier books, Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos(California, 2003) and Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood(California, 1998), bring two of the biggest and best known early writers to life for us, Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary allows Valeria Belletti, as humble a subject as one might ask for, to have her due attention.

After all, she is the woman frequently referred to as having discovered Gary Cooper and made him a star. No less an authority than Frances Marion gave her credit, and felt sorry, as did Belletti, that his success would end any chance the secretary might have for a romance with him.

In letters back East to a lifelong friend, Belletti describes the work she and others did behind the scenes to make the pictures, and, more generally, what life was like for “ordinary” workers in the extraordinary place that Southern California was in the 1920s. An independent woman who enjoyed her happiness and took pride in her work, Belletti nonetheless hoped to be, and eventually was, happily married, after which her career in the movies ended.

How do we come to have access to such a delightful and informative set of letters? As Beauchamp describes it, after she wrote Without Lying Down, Belletti’s daughter-in-law, Margery Baragona, contacted her. “She wrote that after reading my book she realized she was ‘sitting on history’: her mother-in-law had been Sam Goldwyn’s secretary, and in the family cupboards were dozens of letters she had sent to her girlfriend Irma from the studios during the 1920s” (211). The Baragonas soon after donated the letters to the Margaret Herrick Library, and Beauchamp mentioned the donation to “Emily Leider, who was working on a biography of Rudolph Valentino” (ibid.). Leider urged Beauchamp to look at the letters and to “get them published” (ibid.).

Beauchamp’s editorial work is excellent, as usual. She provides segues between letters, the occasional footnote, and the even more occasional interjection into letters – all informative, well timed, and light-handed. Occasionally we get the direct benefit of her earlier research, especially on Frances Marion, for Belletti was in a small way a protégé of Marion, although Belletti’s aspirations to be a writer for films never went much beyond contributions to dialogue titles when a (silent) film was being reworked by disgruntled producers and directors and she was in the screening room taking notes.

Along with the new perspective on Marion, Belletti provides a unique point of view on the first Stella Dallas. She associated its financial success with an increase in her own personal fortune, since she intended to ask for a raise of $5 per week if the film did well. She’s also forthcoming in response to a query from Irma:

You want to know what some of the movie people get – well, beginning in our own organization, [Ronald] Colman gets $2000 a week, Belle Bennett $500 a week, Frances Marion gets $10,000 for each continuity she writes, [George] Fitzmaurice gets $50,000 for each picture he directs and 50% of the profits of each picture. [Henry] King gets $75,000 for each picture and 25% of the profits. (83)

At this point, Beauchamp comments that “Goldwyn had his two directors under profit-participation deals, in part to limit production costs; he said, ‘You spend a dollar of my money, you are spending a dollar of your own money’” (footnote, 83).

In contrast, in the same letter we learn that Belletti and friends with whom she’s previously shared an apartment are planning on renting “another apartment which is nearer to the studio and is larger than any we’ve had before” (82). Yet, from her description, although the three women were paying ever increasing monthly fees for rent, gas, electricity, and phone services, they would still have cramped sleeping arrangements – and this would be the seventh place in which Belletti lived since she moved to California. Belletti speaks often of the need to spend money on clothes to look right in her work environment or for her active social life, yet of her desire to save up for extended travel plans involving New York and Europe.

Is Belletti herself interesting? Yes. We learn a bit about her family from her letters, but again Beauchamp fills in what we need to know. Her Italian parents came to the United States, but while her mother liked it and stayed, her father returned to Italy. Upon her mother’s death, she daringly went with her friend Irma to California with the intention of staying behind if she thought she’d have a better life there than in New Jersey. She found the climate better for her health, and she enjoyed a wide variety of physical activities with a constant pageant of friends, many from the studios. At times she comments on how California is changing around her, and when she finally saves up enough money to visit her father in Italy, her comments on fascism’s effect on the Italians are equally striking. Even before she inherited some money from him, she spoke of owning stocks and, later, of her purchase of a house as an investment.

Upon her return to Hollywood, she worked for DeMille’s studio, occasionally for Jeanie Macpherson in particular. This was at a time when the studios were having to cope with the transition to sound. Belletti describes the insecurity the new technology engendered in studio executives and general workers alike.

Of course, as we read these final letters, it is hard to ignore the approaching economic depression, even if Belletti never mentions it. Yet, in the book’s last letter (dated May 10, 1929), Belletti tells Irma, “I am no longer working for writers but am now assistant supervisor in the stenographic dept. and have been given a $5 dollar raise” (204). It seems likely that, had Belletti not married and had she not suffered increasingly from asthma, she could have stayed employed in the studios.

As Irma never married, the letters might have gone on for a lifetime, or until either correspondent realized the value of the information the letters contained and herself made them into a book. As that didn’t happen, we can be grateful that Cari Beauchamp has done the work enabling us the pleasure of reading through an extraordinary window into the past.

Harriet Margolis,
Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Created on: Tuesday, 5 June 2007